How can I disable postfix on startup?

Solution 1:

Postfix is started in init.d, so you can use update-rc.d to disable it on startup:

sudo update-rc.d postfix disable

When you want to enable it again:

sudo update-rc.d postfix enable

Even if it's disabled you can still start it manually with sudo service postfix start.

If update-rc.d is not in your system, you'll have to install the package sysvinit-utils or sysv-rc, or similar (those are for 12.04, I don't remember if 10.04 use the same names).

As for the notifications, usually the email will give you a clue on which job sent it, but if you want to track all jobs run by cron, you can take a look at the crontab and /etc/cron.*. See the section NOTES in man cron for details.

crontab -l
sudo crontab -l
ls -lr /etc/cron.*

You could also check the syslog:

sudo grep -i cron /var/log/syslog

Solution 2:

Stop the service as root: update-rc.d postfix disable View the queue as root: showq

Also see the SEE ALSO section in the manual page on the Web.

Each cron job that does not need E-mail output redirects output to /dev/null: For example,

15 5 * * * command > /dev/null 2>&1